Louis Silverstein, Who Gave a Bolder and Airier Look to The Times, Dies at 92

Louis Silverstein, a former art director and assistant managing editor at The New York Times, designing a page in 1981.Credit
The New York Times

When The New York Times began publishing on Sept. 18, 1851, it was the New-York Daily Times. — without a “The” but with a period. When the newspaper took its present name six years later, the hyphen stayed (until 1896), and so did the period, until 1967. That was the year that Louis Silverstein, with the nervous approval of his tradition-minded superiors, got rid of it, ending more than a decade of debate.

It was just one among many changes to the newspaper that Mr. Silverstein, who died on Thursday at 92, made as art director, some of them far more consequential than the deletion of a dot.

In 1976, he helped devise a bigger, more visually expansive and, to many, more appealing New York Times (retaining the “The” it had since acquired). It was a rethinking of the paper that was as important to its future then as the Internet is today, and one that influenced newspaper design nationwide.

In a 1984 survey in the magazine Advertising Age, graphics experts ranked The Times as the best-designed paper in the country. Two years later, The Los Angeles Times said Mr. Silverstein had influenced the redesign of newspapers from coast to coast, winning accolades as the “godfather” of modern newspaper design. Tom Bodkin, the current art director and an assistant managing editor of The Times, said Mr. Silverstein elevated newspaper design from a trade to a profession.

Mr. Silverstein’s original mission at The Times was to help attract a younger, more affluent readership at a time when television and an economic downturn were eroding newspapers’ influence and profitability. The Times, Mr. Silverstein understood, had to modernize. “The Gray Lady,” as it was unflatteringly called, with its tightly packed columns of dense type relieved only sparingly by a photograph or map, would no longer do.

Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor of The Times, said Mr. Silverstein responded with a vision for opening up the design, making more creative use of typefaces, enlarging photographs, adding explanatory graphics and running fewer stories on a page.

“He wanted the paper to breathe,” Mr. Gelb said.

Many of Mr. Silverstein’s contributions remain evident. He enlarged the typeface to make it more comfortable to read. He engineered the reconfiguration of the front page to six columns from eight in 1976, a change that New York magazine likened to tinkering with the “Stradivarius of journalism.”

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Mr. Silverstein oversaw the look of new daily sections, including Home.

When The Times, under the executive editor A. M. Rosenthal, expanded to four daily sections from two, adding SportsMonday, Science Times, Living, Home and Weekend, Mr. Silverstein envisioned and nurtured their look. Separate sections for metropolitan and business news were also created. “Every time you pick up the paper, you have in your hands a reflection of Lou’s sparkling talent,” Mr. Rosenthal once said.

Mr. Silverstein was typically brought in to design the front page when a story of historic dimensions came along, like the first man on the moon. The front page was given over entirely to that event, complete with a poem for the occasion by Archibald MacLeish and, at the time, the biggest banner headline in The Times’s history: “Men Walk on Moon.”

Before becoming the paper’s design director, Mr. Silverstein was an abstract painter, an art director for advertising agencies and the corporate art director for The New York Times Company. Promoting the paper’s classified ads, he dreamed up the well-known slogan “I got my job through The New York Times.”

He had a fresh, magazinelike sensibility that the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, hoped to tap when he sent him to the newsroom to challenge traditional newspaper practices.

When Mr. Silverstein was inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame in 1984, the designer Massimo Vignelli said, “By changing The Times and so many newspapers, we are indebted to him for improving the quality of our lives.”

Louis Silverstein was born on Oct. 10, 1919, in Brooklyn, where his parents owned a grocery store. Neighbors admired his chalk drawings on the sidewalk, though a few jaws dropped over his Michelangelo-inspired nudes. He graduated from Boys High School and earned a fine arts degree from Pratt Institute. He went to work in advertising and did graphic design while serving in the Army Air Forces. After World War II he studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he threw himself into avant-garde design.

He worked for labor unions, an ad agency and the State Department, where he was art director for Amerika, a Russian-language magazine distributed in the Soviet Union. He joined The Times in the promotion department in 1952, becoming its director the next year.

Mr. Silverstein made an early foray into newspaper design in 1967, when he effected the first change in The Times’s typeface in a quarter-century, shifting from 8-point Ideal to 8 1/2-point Imperial. This was the year he enlarged and sharpened the front page logotype and dropped the period. (Its removal saved the paper $45 a year in ink.)

Mr. Silverstein was named art director for The New York Times Company, the parent corporation, in 1969; the next year he added art direction of the newspaper to his portfolio.

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Mr. Silverstein designed the front page after men walked on the moon. It was, at the time, the biggest banner headline in The Times's history.

An early assignment was to develop a look for the Op-Ed page, which first appeared in 1970. He came up with an expansive design using a new form of editorial art — not a standard political cartoon, not an illustration, but rather an artwork that used metaphor, allegory or literary allusion to complement a text.

One example was a monster dinosaur threatening a figure carrying an oil drum, suggesting the revenge of the fossil fuels. Another was of Easter Island-type monoliths with Nixon-like visages. Here the suggestion was that the Watergate scandal would one day seem as remote historically as the South Pacific island sculptures are geographically.

In 1976, Mr. Silverstein huddled with the publisher and the top editors to start two Sunday regional sections, New Jersey and Long Island, hoping to tap an affluent market by offering local news and ads. Westchester and Connecticut followed in 1977.

Then came the new daily sections: SportsMonday, Science Times on Tuesdays, Living on Wednesdays, Home on Thursdays and Weekend on Fridays. Their large illustrations and photos and bold typefaces lent a magazine-style sweep to broadsheet newsprint. Their banners were larger than the New York Times nameplate on the front page.

In 1976, Mr. Silverstein was promoted to assistant managing editor, a position no one from the art department had ever achieved. In 1980, The Times nominated him for a special Pulitzer Prize for his design of the feature sections; it was the first time an art director at the paper was so honored. And in 1988, the Cooper Union in Manhattan had an exhibition of his page designs.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Silverstein is survived by his wife of 60 years, the former Helen Becker, and two grandsons. His son, Jamie, died in 1972 at 16.

After he retired on Jan. 1, 1985, Mr. Silverstein stayed on as a Times consultant, redesigning 35 of the company’s regional newspapers. He also redesigned newspapers in Kenya, Brazil and Spain.

For all his visual innovations, Mr. Silverstein battled stubborn opposition to even the tiniest changes to The Times. Traditionalists complained that the snappy new “soft news” sections devoured newsprint that might have been given over to “hard news.” They joked that the paper was going to unveil another new section and call it “News.”

Mr. Silverstein’s answer came in the success of the new sections, at a time when The Times was desperate for a turnaround. When the newspaper introduced its first new section, Weekend, on a Friday, it sold 70,000 extra copies.

Correction: December 3, 2011

An obituary on Friday about Louis Silverstein, the former art director of The New York Times, misstated the year when his son, Jamie, died, and his son’s age at death. Though, as the obituary said, Jamie Silverstein was hit by a car and suffered a severe brain injury in 1964, shortly before his ninth birthday, he died in 1972 at age 16.

A version of this article appears in print on December 2, 2011, on page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: Louis Silverstein, Who Gave a Bolder and Airier Look to The Times, Dies at 92. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe